Unrigging Rigging the Election II

With Halloween approaching, right-wing con-artist James O'Keefe has again dressed up as a journalist and handed out for tricks and treats the first three videos in a new series, "Rigging the Election," alleging misdeeds by Democratic operatives in the ongoing presidential campaign. As covered here Saturday, the first video in this series proved a witch's brew of misrepresentation, obfuscation and dubious assertions that attempted to cook up the impression in low-information viewers of a scandal from materials that didn't support the conclusion. With the second, O'Keefe's trick--or, depending on the audience, treat--is the Blob, a mushy, formless accusation of voter fraud he hopes will devour Democrats.

The problems with that first video are only amplified in the next, in which, O'Keefe asserts, "Democratic operatives tell us how to successfully commit voter fraud on a massive scale." Once again, Scott Foval is the star of the show. As noted in my previous article,

"Foval seems to like to run his mouth. He brags about how he's a guy who, unlike some of his more timid comrades, gets things done and doesn't worry too much about niceties like legality. Speaks in often grandiose terms. Tells some stories that sound a bit far-fetched. Foval is the central focus of both of O'Keefe's videos and the sole source for what O'Keefe's spins into the sensational allegation around which the first is built and everything he says comes through a cloud of hot air offered in what appears to be a series of saloons! While drinking."

So it's back to the bar! O'Keefe explains:

"Our investigators wanted to know what it would take to get the highest favorable turnout. Democratic politico Scott Foval was our target and he was more than willing to lead us through the process of how to rig an election."

The characterization of Foval in the context of "Democratic operatives" and, directly, as a "Democratic politico" is weasel-wording; Foval is, himself, a Democrat (presumably) and his activities support Democratic causes but he works for Americans United For Change, not for the Democratic party, and that distinction is significant in the context of these videos. In what follows, O'Keefe's tale is that Foval concocts a voter fraud scheme and O'Keefe's operatives shop it around to Robert Creamer of Democracy Partners (another return character from the first vid) and Cesar Vargas of the DREAM Action Coalition. Though O'Keefe describes this vid as "part 2 of our undercover investigation of the dark, backroom dealings of the Hillary Clinton campaign," none of these individuals are employed by the Clinton campaign.

In a bit of editing cynical enough to be funny, O'Keefe joins Foval already in progress, in the middle of a story about how people "manipulate the vote." Foval says "we did it to them when we were in charge too. We did the exact same thing." Who is "we"? Who is "them"? Presumably, the "them" are Republicans but O'Keefe chopped off the first part of the story wherein Foval apparently explained what those Republicans had done to manipulate the vote. Entirely unintentional, I'm sure.

There's another cut and Foval is talking about Republicans complaining that "they're bussing people in" and then crows about how "we've been bussing people in to deal with you fucking assholes for fifty years and we're not going to stop now." Bussing who? Bussing them where? For what purpose? "To deal with you fucking assholes" is as clear as mud. Foval is talking about how "they used to bus people out to Iowa." One of the tactics used by Americans United For Change, Foval's employer, involves bussing demonstrators from state to state. Last year, for example, AUFC arranged to take a busload of Wisconsinites to the Iowa State Fair to protest an appearance there by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, then a GOP presidential hopeful. Is this what Foval is describing? The complete lack of any sort of context or clarification here invites readers to draw their own conclusions based on what follows.

And what follows is O'Keefe trying to plug a massive hole. "The plan that was discussed," he says, "is how to bring people from one state into another state to vote illegally." Note the weasel-wording--"the plan that was discussed"--that leaves on the cutting-room floor who suggested this plan, which is certainly O'Keefe's operative. If Foval had done so, it's inconceivable that O'Keefe would leave out that footage. Foval never even articulates the gist of the plan O'Keefe claims is being discussed and the details of this alleged plan remain amorphous--liquid right to the end of the video and not, one suspects, unintentionally. Contrary to O'Keefe's set-up--that Foval is "more than willing to lead us through the process"--it's clear in some of the footage that it's O'Keefe's operative who is doing the leading. It's the operative, for example, who suggests how to establish addresses for, O'Keefe claims, "their phony voters." Foval even congratulates him at one point. "That's brilliant. I love it." O'Keefe leaves out the footage of the origin of this scheme then, after having left viewers with the impression it started with Foval, flatly refers, later in the video, to "the voter fraud scheme that Foval created."

So what's this really about? Various aspects of some sort of scheme or schemes are being kicked around through the heavy edits[1] but it's all theoretical discussion, with the alleged larger plan never outlined. At one point, Foval says

"what you do is you implement the plan on a much bigger scale.You implement a massive change in state legislatures and in congress. So you aim higher for your goals and you implement it across every Republican-held state."

...which sounds nothing at all like what O'Keefe claims they're discussing but it does sound extraordinarily grandiose and unfeasible, which lends the entire conversation an air of a couple of guys sitting around a tavern, knockin' 'em back and engaging in a bullshit session. Say, you've been involved in the politics business--how could we put together a voter fraud scheme and get away with it? This would explain why they're comfortable openly discussing a scheme that, if O'Keefe's characterization is correct, would be incredibly illegal right in the midst of a bar full of people. This would also explain why, contrary to every conceivable journalistic rule of thumb, O'Keefe chose to entirely omit the set-up for this entire conversation. Most importantly, this--the most likely explanation for what's occurring--would render the entire thing a non-story.

To continue his tale, O'Keefe drops in a clip in which Foval says "Bob Creamer comes up with a lot of these ideas," and goes on to explain how he and Creamer think alike. It implies Creamer is a shady guy who comes up with "ideas" like this voter fraud scheme but nothing in the clip connects these comments to that particular scheme. To reinforce the impression he's created, O'Keefe immediately rehashes Creamer's legal troubles from over a decade ago.[2]

Another O'Keefe operative is then shown making a pitch to Creamer. The operative, who was apparently posing as a donor, says "Steve"--whoever that may be is never stated--"was talking to Scott"--presumably Scott Foval, though that too is never stated--and passed along an idea "they envisioned" and that he likes. "What do you need to be able to vote?" He says you need an ID card and a pay stub showing a local address then suggests hiring people at his business. "I could use them as day laborers or whatever and use them and find my way around the... voter registration laws for Hispanics... We could register huge numbers of people that way." The careless listener is supposed to read "Hispanic" as "illegal immigrant" but the operative never says that and, in fact, never suggests anything illegal at all--he's talking about registering Hispanics to vote. Further, Creamer knows Foval and probably knows "Steve," meaning he knows they wouldn't send someone to him with a voter fraud scheme. Creamer says "this is very important, this stuff" and offers to put the fellow in contact with "people who are most involved in Hispanic voter registration... [T]here are a couple of different organizations, that's are, that's their big trick."

Now, having left the viewer with the false impression that Creamer just agreed to assist in a voter fraud scheme, O'Keefe offers a clip of Foval saying "Bob Creamer is diabolical and I love him for it. I have learned so much from that man in the last twenty years, I can't even tell you."

O'Keefe then says what he'd earlier just implied: "We had our 'donor' set up a second meeting with Bob Creamer to see how he could help put this voter fraud plan into motion." A little later, he refers to it as "the voter fraud scheme that Foval created," but in none of the footage of Foval talking about this alleged scheme is Foval shown "creating" even a single element of the idea that had been shown being put to Creamer. And what was put to Creamer on camera wasn't a voter fraud scheme--it was about legally registering Hispanic voters. In the second meeting with Creamer, the O'Keefe operative suggests he could "issue corporate IDs" for these theoretical voters and O'Keefe immediately cuts away, never showing the rest of his own op's comment. The viewer is meant to assume such "corporate IDs" are a scheme to allow people to skirt voter registration laws but they wouldn't actually allow for that. Foval, in the early portion of the video, mentions, as states ripe for whatever is being discussed, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan. The fake "donor" who goes to see Creamer also mentions Michigan and includes Illinois. A quick trip over to Rock The Vote reveals that all of those states except Illinois require a government-issued ID. If that's the big scheme, it's a non-starter and Creamer and Foval would probably know this.

Creamer says as much when he spoke to Sam Stein of the Huffington Post on Friday about this matter, offering, more broadly, his side of what happened:

"One of the undercover Project Veritas videographers got to Creamer by posing as a donor. Creamer was introduced to the videographer by Foval, who was also under the impression that the 'donor' was concerned about the immigrant community and eager to subsidize methods for mobilizing them politically.

"'I met with him and he sold me completely,' Creamer recalled. 'He was a very genuine guy who had a whole story about his family history. He was great.'

"Creamer said that he first pitched the 'donor' on doing a bus trip to help get out the vote. He says the Project Veritas 'donor' then suggested the scheme involving hiring undocumented workers, issuing them corporate IDs and pay stubs and getting them registered in battleground states.

"'Frankly, I didn't understand what he was proposing, because corporate IDs wouldn’t do the job,' Creamer said. 'It has to be a government ID.'

"But instead of dismissing the man outright and ending the conversation, Creamer said, he tried to steer him toward other ideas. The 'donor' struck him as someone who was passionate but not well-versed in electoral law...'This guy seemed well-motivated,' Creamer said. 'And I thought, he is just naive about what's available, what is possible and what is legal.'"

In an email to the Huffington Post that same day, Foval told a similar story:

"Despite our attempts to redirect the conversation and actions towards positive, results-oriented, legal and ethical political organizing, O’Keefe’s crew of imposters continued to walk down a path of deception and manipulation. Our team took the high road, deciding to not indulge the imposters in their dubious scheme, rather attempting to put our energies and intentions towards positive activities that garner electorally relevant results. All who view these recordings should remember that they were speculative conversations where we attempted to correct a misguided idea put forth by O’Keefe and his cronies, and we did not take the bait."

In the video, Creamer, upon getting more details from the fake donor (and whatever those details may be, we're not shown them), begins to get the idea that what's being put to him would be perceived as a "big voter fraud scheme" and declines to assist. As O'Keefe puts it, he "hesitated" to participate. O'Keefe cuts to a clip of Foval talking about a conversation he had with Creamer:

"Bob came back to me and asked me, 'What is he talking about?' I told him what we were talking about. And he said 'Well, I'm not gonna' touch that with a ten-foot pole now.' I go 'Nor should you.'"

O'Keefe's operative chimes in: "Good advice."

"Nor should you," Foval continues. "He goes, 'Good, I'm glad we're on the same page there.'

The viewer is meant to assume this happened after that second meeting between Creamer and the fake donor but as usual, O'Keefe refuses to provide a timeline or any context. And what are they even talking about? An alleged voter fraud scheme that is impossible to execute and that no one in any of the footage has even articulated? There is a reason O'Keefe in his editing is perpetually treating the details of this alleged scheme like vapor.

Foval says there are other people "who can make things happen," people Creamer doesn't "need to know about" but then suggests Creamer actually will know about them anyway. O'Keefe:

"Foval told us about a guy in New York who works with Creamer a lot  We wondered if he was the guy who could pull off the voter fraud scheme."

Cut to a clip of Foval telling the operative about Cesar Vargas, one of the founders of the DREAM Action Coalition, which works for immigration reform, and is himself an undocumented immigrant. "Bob is really good friends with him [Vargas] and talked to him this afternoon." The impression is that after Creamer turned down the scheme, he and Foval arranged for O'Keefe's operative to meet Vargas, who may assist them in it but it's just a bunch of editing. The Foval footage is from a different day than the "ten-foot pole" conversation--it's a different locale and he's wearing a different shirt and a tie, which he didn't have in the earlier clip--and Foval never mentions anything about any scheme and O'Keefe's set-up--"we wondered if"--doesn't actually tie his op's intro to Vargas to one either. Vargas has authored an article in the Nation offering his side of what happened. As he tells it, the people with whom he met were sold to him as representatives of a donor "who supposedly wanted to give money to the immigrant-rights movement," which is consistent with Creamer's explanation.

The alleged scheme, as outlined to Vargas, morphs again. O'Keefe's operative describes it as "essentially getting people on a bus or whatever, taking them around the country. They can legally vote. At the same time, they're also getting work permits under a different name and again voting on behalf of people who cannot vote." No one in the video before that moment had discussed any such double-voting scheme. Foval, in his comments about transporting people (to whatever), had in fact specifically said not to use a bus.

The inclusion of Vargas seems practically random. He doesn't work for the DNC; he's just a lawyer and activist in New York. He's on the receiving end of O'Keefe's worst hatchet-job with the editing suite here. The operative puts the apparently newly-reimagined scheme to him, he barely gets in a few words (about the 2018 midterm elections) and then O'Keefe throws in an edit. What follows are a series of clips of comments by Vargas that are presented as his responses to the scheme but that don't actually seem to be connected to it at all. Vargas explains how "this is not gonna' happen this election." What's not going to happen? He says if Donald Trump is elected, "it even makes more sense." What makes more sense? "The issue will be more credible and much more opportunity for us to jump in to this." What issue? Viewers are left with the impression it's the scheme but it doesn't make any sense to describe it that way. Cut/cut/cut. At one point, Vargas says "count me in." Count him in on what? All of this is missing and if it was actually in reference to the scheme, it wouldn't be. To compensate, O'Keefe offers a particularly outrageous sleight-of-hand: His running, on-screen script records his operative as saying, "I assume you don't go tell these conversations to anybody? Because this is technically, you know, vote fraud," and Vargas replies "No, absolutely. Absolutely." But in the video, the operative doesn't actually say "vote fraud"--she just trails off with "you know..." In the last clip of Vargas, he's saying "As an activist, do we want to do this? Do we want to take the chance? Let's talk about it." Do what? Talk about what? Take what chance? If Vargas was actually saying any of these things about a voter fraud scheme, it wouldn't be left to rest entirely on inference.

As Vargas explains:

"To set the record straight: I am not an operative for the Democratic Party. I did not agree that I would drive a busload of people to commit voter fraud, nor did I agree that I would help anyone commit voter fraud. I met with the group only once, for less than an hour... I was explaining what the outcome of the presidential election will mean for the future of voter-ID laws, which have prevented thousands of Americans from voting; the role of civil disobedience in politics; and the role of activists in planning those protests... During our short conversation, I explained a few times the effective work that my organization, the DREAM Action Coalition, has done and that has been covered by the media... Throughout the conversation, the two conservative operatives said that their fake donor wanted to go beyond this kind of activism and help people vote twice, as a way to enfranchise those who can’t vote. Several times, I informed them that voting twice is illegal, but I told them we could go another route to give people who don’t have a vote a voice in the election.

"In light of Tea Party efforts around the country to make it harder for minorities to vote, I told them, their donor could immediately support a campaign that would elevate the voices of American citizens who want to commit their vote on behalf of their undocumented loved ones. Another option was to support initiatives like the NYC ID program, which allows anyone, regardless of immigration status, to obtain a much-needed identification card and thus gain more access to civil society. Despite these options, the operatives were pushy in their donor’s desire to help people to vote twice all over the country.

"I assured them my confidence and allowed them to talk about their schemes as a way to humor a potential supporter. Needless to say, never would I have participated in any voter-fraud scheme. The unedited video tells the complete story."[3]

Creamer echoes that last. "Creamer said O'Keefe's tapes make a misleading case," writes the HuffPost's Stein, "and that if the full footage were made public, those deceptions would be evident." Creamer calls for the footage to be made public, something O'Keefe has, to date, adamantly refused to do.

Without O'Keefe's dubious narrative and editorial games, it isn't at all clear the three segments of this video--Foval, Creamer, Vargas--are even related to one another. All three of the principals involved have indicated they had a potential donor who was a bit misguided but had a common interest in various issues and they were trying to be helpful and steer him in a more positive direction, which, unlike O'Keefe's explanation, does seem to match the footage insofar as Creamer and Vargas are concerned. Foval is talking about some sort of scheme in the first segment but the conversation has all the earmarks of a barroom bullshit session and contrary to O'Keefe, nothing that is actually discussed in it on camera--procuring cars, apparently setting up dummy addresses, operating in states with weak laws, carrying out some sort of legislative revolution--makes its way into any of the other segments and O'Keefe's operatives are the ones shopping around in those other segments, not Foval. O'Keefe's assertion that this is the same scheme being discussed throughout is false. No single scheme is ever articulated; the details offered in each segment contradict the details offered in the other segments. Most importantly, no one ever clearly agrees to have anything to do with any of these schemes (except, briefly, the one that wasn't presented as voter fraud) and despite O'Keefe's assertion that this is an investigation of "the Hillary Clinton campaign," no one who appears is employed by that campaign and there's never any effort to connect any of this to it or even to the DNC, except by inference.

In 1958, a young Steve McQueen managed to vanquish the Blob. Like a lot of movie monsters, it managed to return but the second time around, the film was a flop. That's O'Keefe's Blob. As Halloween approaches, O'Keefe promises even more such critters. Be wary!

--j.

---

[1] Bespeaking the missing footage, the music on the jukebox in the background is different in every clip.

[2] As in the first video, O'Keefe says Creamer "pled guilty on tax violations and bank fraud," then in the breath says "he was convicted..."

[3] Vargas, the lawyer, notes that O'Keefe's tactics are "possible grounds for defamation" but perhaps canny of the reaction any suit by himself, an undocumented immigrant, would draw, he indicates he won't be filing one.

Unrigging Rigging The Election I

Right-wing con-artist James O'Keefe has struck again, releasing a pair of videos that allege wrongdoing by Democrats and the Clinton campaign. At Wednesday's presidential debate, the allegations were raised, in a significantly distorted form, by Republican candidate Donald Trump and are getting much play in right-wing media, with the usual accompanying persecution narrative about the mainstream press ignoring the "story." Despite this standard-issue hue and cry, it isn't really clear there's much of a story here.

O'Keefe has made a career out of peddling to credulous rightists one politically motivated fraud after another. Media Matters, last week, offered a sort of greatest hits package of his past antics. O'Keefe calls his org "Project Veritas," which reminds the wary that it's always a wise move to keep a good stock of irony jokes close at hand when dealing with anything having to do with O'Keefe. The standard M.O. of O'Keefe and his operatives is to adopt various disguises and try to get people associated with liberal or Democratic causes to say and do politically damaging things on hidden cameras. O'Keefe then heavily edits the footage and presents it in a sort of mockery of an "investigative report," released with headline-grabbing allegations. It usually takes no more than a few days for these efforts to blow up in his face but no matter how often it does, he keeps right on churning them out and his followers keep right on eating them up--Wile E. Coyote going over the cliff over and over again.

The O'Keefe project currently causing such a stir is entitled "Rigging The Election," echoing Donald Trump's constant refrain whenever facing a potential loss. O'Keefe bills it as an "investigation into the dark, backroom dealings of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign" and he released two videos in the series this week. Both suffer from some of the same really obvious problems. Among other things, they're edited in such a way as to obscure the context of most of what's said in them, they offer no clear timeline for when these conversations are taking place relative to either one another or to events in the campaign (rather important, for reasons I'll cover in a moment), they're staged, edited and narrated in such a way as to leave viewers with a certain impression of events that isn't supported by the footage itself and that impression--that misimpression--is their story. Nothing else is offered to support it. O'Keefe adopts superficial trappings of investigative journalism but if he or any of his gremlins ever investigated the veracity of any of the statements in these videos, they're silent on the results--or the existence--of any such inquiry.

The problematic nature of that last becomes immediately apparent in the footage of Scott Foval of the Foval Group, who works as a subcontractor for political consulting firm Democracy Partners and also for pro-Democratic group Americans United For Change.[1] Foval seems to like to run his mouth. He brags about how he's a guy who, unlike some of his more timid comrades, gets things done and doesn't worry too much about niceties like legality. Speaks in often grandiose terms. Tells some stories that sound a bit far-fetched. Foval is the central focus of both of O'Keefe's videos and the sole source for what O'Keefe's spins into the sensational allegation around which the first is built and everything he says comes through a cloud of hot air offered in what appears to be a series of saloons! While drinking.

No, really.

The fact that political partisans organize demonstrations against their opponents is about as much a revelation as the color of the sky but O'Keefe's first video, released Monday, struggles mightily to present this as some dark conspiracy that O'Keefe and his operatives are unraveling. That word--"dark"--is, in fact, used repeatedly. O'Keefe sets it up thusly:

"There is a narrative[2] that supporters at Trump rallies are violent and dangerous, looking to beat up protesters who don't agree with them but our undercover investigation of the Hillary Clinton Democratic party machine reveals a very different story."

Except it doesn't. The rest of the video is devoted to unspooling O'Keefe's alternate narrative, the idea that operatives from various groups the vid associates with the Clinton campaign are actually the ones orchestrating this violence but in the undercover footage, the only one who talks about violence is Foval and while he says he wants the anti-Trump demonstrators he organizes to be attacked by Trump supporters so as to make the news, he's also very clear that it's Trump supporters alone who bring the violence. He calls them "naturally psychotic" at one point, "crazies" at another, and the only tactics he describes for getting them to lash out are things like wearing a Planned Parenthood t-shirt or saying things with which they disagree."If you're there and you're protesting and you do these actions," says Foval, "you will be attacked at Trump rallies... we know... [Trump's] supporters will lose their shit." Contrary to O'Keefe's implication, this can only work because many of Trump's supporters are "violent and dangerous" and, regularly urged on by the candidate himself, will "beat up protesters who don't agree with them," and that's exactly what has happened over and over again, regardless of whether those protesters were organized by Foval or not.

That fact has the effect of rendering this alleged practice--the central allegation of the video--rather spectacularly uncontroversial, which is, of course, why O'Keefe pours on the weasel-wording. His conspiracy narrative is often constructed around an elaborate fairy-tale aimed at low-information viewers. He asserts that the anti-Trump demonstrations are presented as "spontaneous"[3] then positions himself as the hero who comes along to draw back the curtain and expose them as, in fact, highly organized by a black and secret conspiracy of Democratic operatives. When, for example, O'Keefe is talking about an anti-Trump demonstration that, in March, shut down a Trump appearance in Chicago, he says "based on our reporting, the event was not spontaneous" and then tries to "prove" it. But all of these protests are openly organized. It is, of course, impossible to get hundreds or even thousands of people to show up for any sort of political event without organization. In this internet age, a three-second Google search will yield a wealth of details. In Chicago, congressman Luis Gutierrez and other elected officials openly called on their constituents to join them in protesting Trump, a Facebook page dedicated to protesting the Trump event was launched and a multitude of different groups--Black Lives Matter to MoveOn to Mijente, Assata's Daughter, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and on and on--were involved in this organizing. These are the sources of anti-Trump protests, not some cabal of secret Democratic-party-connected organizers, and Trump doesn't draw demonstrators because of anything that secret cabal does, he draws them because people in a liberal democratic society find his protofascist message extremely offensive.[4] Any sizable demonstration--by groups of any political orientation--has to be organized and that patently obvious fact sends a big portion of O'Keefe's fantasy narrative up in smoke.

O'Keefe introduces Aaron Black of Democracy Partners and Americans United For Change as a fellow who "directs the 'spontaneous' protests at Trump and Pence events." Black, in the hidden-camera footage, says "nobody's really supposed to know about me." Gotcha! Except Black's activities are a matter of public record. Turning to his profile on the Democracy Partners website, one reads, among other things, "Black is instrumental at organizing rapid response events targeting GOP Presidential candidates throughout the country for Americans United for Change during the 2016 elections." In the vid, Black claims to be "deputy rapid response director for the DNC for all things Trump on the ground" and this is how O'Keefe ties him to the DNC. Did O'Keefe investigate this claim, like, say, a journalist? The video is silent on the question, which would be damning enough, but Time's Philip Elliot then looked into this and confirms, via an examination of the FEC records with which O'Keefe and co. couldn't be bothered, that Black hasn't worked for the DNC during this two-year election cycle. As a DNC official told Elliot, Black "was just bullshitting."[5]

O'Keefe uses his footage to draw connections that aren't born out by it and to make all sorts of inferences he makes no effort to prove. His aim is to tie everything he's presenting to the Democratic party and/or the Clinton campaign, which really means tying Foval to those entities, though Foval doesn't appear to have worked for either. Foval was a subcontractor for Democracy Partners and Democracy Partners worked for the Democratic National Committee. That firm never worked for the Clinton campaign but it had contact with that campaign through the DNC. Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners is a longtime Democratic insider and another who gets the hidden camera treatment.[6] Creamer is shown describing his work for the DNC, which involved organizing anti-Trump demonstrations. O'Keefe buttresses his straw-man assertion that the Chicago protest was "not spontaneous" with a brief clip of Creamer, who says "we have a call to the campaign every day to go over the focuses that need to be undertaken." See? The Clinton campaign is in on it! Except the Chicago demonstrations happened in March and Democracy Partners didn't start working with the DNC until June. O'Keefe tries to tie what Foval is saying to what happened in Chicago but according to the same Time article referenced above, Foval didn't become a subcontractor for Democracy Partners until some time in April. And that, dear reader, is why James O'Keefe doesn't offer a timeline for any of this material.

More importantly, at no point does Creamer ever say a word about inciting violence at Trump rallies. He says nothing about even knowing of such things. O'Keefe tries to tie him to this by showing a brief clip of Foval describing how he and Creamer obsess over getting press attention for the events they hold but Foval isn't, at that point, talking about inciting violence. Aaron Black organizes protests and says he was involved in organizing the Chicago events but he, likewise, never says anything about inciting violence. O'Keefe's hidden cameras seek out Zulema Rodriguez, another activist who says she took part in the Chicago demonstrations and who says she talks to the DNC and the Clinton campaign every day, presumably as part of some sort of conference call for activists[7], but--stop me if you've heard this one before--she doesn't say anything about inciting violence.[8]

Is it remotely plausible that O'Keefe's operatives would fail to try to get these people to talk about this, the central allegation in their "report"? Where's that footage? Where's the explanation? And while Foval speaks admiringly of Creamer and Creamer is, in turn, how O'Keefe connects Foval to the DNC, Creamer never mentions Foval, not once. If O'Keefe's operatives ever asked Creamer about Foval, there's nothing in their video to indicate it. The infrastructure Foval describes is substantial--training for activists in major population centers all over the U.S.--but O'Keefe's operatives never give any indication of having investigated any of this. There's certainly training of activists by an infinity of orgs--like the organization of demonstrations, it's conducted above-ground--but, again, O'Keefe's hidden cameras are never able to find a single activist who claims to have been trained to incite any violence. Foval refers to activist training as "agitator training," which allows O'Keefe, with some fleet-footed editing, to infer it's training in incitement but obviously, that could be a reference to any sort of activist training and in another clip from that same conversation, presented later in the vid, Foval is describing training people to bird-dog candidates.

O'Keefe goes off on a tangent about bird-dogging, presenting it as some sort of secret code Foval is using. "It's a word we had not heard until we got into this investigation," he claims, then points out the fact that it appears in the hacked Democratic emails recently released by Wikileaks, again tying Foval to the Democrats. "Violence at Trump Rallies Traced to Clinton Campaign and the DNC Through Process Called Birddogging," screams a header on the Project Veritas website. Further down, the site says Foval, in this footage, is "introducing the term bird dogging to the political lexicon." But in reality, bird-dogging is a well-known phrase that refers to a longstanding tactic by activists of asking candidates questions, usually ones that are politically tough for them to answer, and trying to get them on the record as either responding or dodging the issue (and has nothing whatsoever to do with "violence"). In the vid, Foval talks about putting people in the right place to do this. Outside of O'Keefe's shadowy conspiracy narrative, its meaning and usage is can be ascertained via a simple Google search, which returns sites like this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this, and those are just the ones on the first page of results.

Despite O'Keefe's record and the obvious, galaxy-sized holes in his scenario, various rightist commentators have followed O'Keefe's lead. Some of them have plunged even further down the rabbit-hole as the internet is suddenly abloom with false claims that it's the anti-Trump demonstrators who are violent. That was the approach used by Donald Trump at Wednesday's presidential debate. Trump, in his usual rambling manner, asserted that the O'Keefe video shows Democrats "telling people to go out and start fist-fights and start violence," which is entirely false.[9]

Is this business of training people to draw to themselves violent incidents something that really happens or is it just a lot of barroom bullshit? When one removes O'Keefe's interlocking false narratives, it hardly matters. As Foval describes his activities--and, again, he's the sole source for any of this--Trump's supporters have always had it in their power to utterly foil his Evil Scheme--if, indeed, any such not-really-terribly-evil-scheme even exists--merely by not acting like a bunch of animals whose immediate reaction to the presence of someone who disagrees is to physically attack that person. If such activity, whatever the source, exposes Trump's supporters as a pack of violent protofascist asswipes, it isn't some black and damnable thing--it's what is known as a public service.

O'Keefe's operatives--they're described in the on-screen text as "journalist"s--ask leading questions (which becomes even more of a problem in the second vid in the series), never say how they presented themselves to their marks, never, as noted earlier, offer any timeline and they never confront their targets, not even to ask for a comment on their "report." Everywhere in their video, there are questions both small-and-minor and big-and-obvious that are left not only entirely unanswered but entirely unasked--they don't investigate anything and in his presentation, O'Keefe persistently chooses to conceal and mislead rather to illuminate and enlighten. As usual. There's little implausible in the scenario he presents but absent his false framing, there's little that's terribly controversial about it either.

The one exception, the one nugget of a legitimate story in all of this, is possible collusion between the Clinton campaign and various entities that are, by law, supposed to be independent of it. "Our attorneys say there is strong evidence of criminality," relates O'Keefe, but as with everything else in the vid, O'Keefe doesn't bother to get those attorneys on camera to explain the law in this matter or how there may have been a breach of it.[10] The rules against collusion between political candidates and outside entities do exist and are regularly flaunted. That this happens isn't really news--everybody does it and everybody knows everybody does it--but there is, here, possible evidence on which to build a case, if anyone in officialdom was ever interested in doing so, which they aren't. Foval describes communications between the various groups and the campaign as "kind of like an ongoing Pony Express. It's not as efficient as it could be but that's because the law doesn't allow it to be," which does suggest the legalities are at least being observed. In another moment, he talks about plausible deniability. Unlike the rest of the rubbish in this vid, this is something worthy of further investigation. Last year, the Trump Foundation ponied up at least $10,000 to Project Veritas, which, in turn, produced and released these videos on one of Donald Trump's most persistent themes--the rigging of elections--right on the verge of the third and most critical presidential debate and Trump then used them to attack Hillary Clinton in that debate. Maybe that, too, is worth further investigation. Or at least another of those irony jokes.

O'Keefe ends his first video with a plea: "As we continue to release more videos, you must hold the mainstream media to account to further investigate what we've uncovered," and he'd certainly like nothing more than to have this all over the news in the final stages of the presidential campaign--which is his whole point--but he's already publicly stated he refuses to release any of his raw footage and given his record, the fact that previous releases of raw footage have repeatedly exposed his misrepresentations and the unbelievable mess he's made of this, the press should decline to indulge him.

--j.

---

 [1] O'Keefe gratuitously notes that Foval previously worked for People For the American Way, "an organization funded by George Soros." Soros has become a lightning rod for anti-Semitic dog-whistling by rightists (PFAW is also funded by the Lear Family Foundation, the Miriam G. and Ira D. Wallach Foundation, the Bauman Family Foundation, the Evelyn & Walter Haas Jr. Fund, various unions and other sources).

 [2] Right away, the careless sloppiness starts. A narrative by whom? Examples? O'Keefe never says and never offers any.

 [3] Presented by who?

 [4] O'Keefe includes a stray comment by Foval in which he says it would be unhelpful if a story appeared on CNN saying certain people were paid for "X." O'Keefe edits this to make it appear as if he's suggesting his violence fomenters are paid but it's unclear what he's discussing. This and a comment wherein Foval talks about paying homeless guys to do crazy things places over the entire narrative the notion that these demonstrators are paid without ever doing anything to substantiate it. What homeless guys? Paid to do what? And so on. Never answered, never asked.

 [5] Further, any assumption that Black didn't clarify his actual job for O'Keefe's operative--like any assumption about any of this--is dependent on the honesty and reliability of O'Keefe and his editing software.

 [6] O'Keefe lovingly notes that in 2005, Creamer "pled guilty to tax violations and bank fraud" then, in his next breath--maybe because he thought both sounded good--he says Creamer "was convicted."

 [7] Because that would make it sound a lot less sinister, O'Keefe doesn't elaborate.

 [8] Rodriguez's inclusion here seems virtually random. Nothing in the video ties her to any of the other players. Politifact reports that she did some paid for for the Clinton campaign in February in the lead-up to the Democratic primary. Time reports "she has since been working for liberal MoveOn.org and its affiliate in Ohio."

 [9] Trump made some other false statements about the vids. Politifact disposed of them yesterday.

[10] By throwing out that statement without specifying what he's describing, O'Keefe (intentionally) creates the impression that it's the activities constituting the central claim of the video--demonstrators being organized to foment violence--that are illegal but they aren't and making them illegal was literally require repealing the 1st Amendment.

The Vice Presidential Debate As A Comic

Tuesday, Vice Presidential candidates Tim Kaine and Mike Pence squared off in their one debate of this campaign season. It was a dreary affair but I just happened to be playing around with some new software when it rolled around and turned the whole affair into a mini-comic--basically, just to learn the software. Though it doesn't really go with the main focus of this blog, I thought I'd throw up the results here anyway--I don't have anything else to do with it.

If it needs to be said, quotations here are very rarely exact.

--j.

A Trump Win the Best Possible Outcome?

I'm definitely an odd choice to be writing a piece like this, which departs somewhat from the usual focus of this blog. This article makes the case that a particular outcome in the presidential contest could yield results that strengthen and thus preserve the two-party system and I'm one who doesn't believe in either the two-party system or liberal democracy or the state. It wouldn't be right to call this devil's advocacy, since I'm not really advocating anything. This is more in the nature of a counterargument to a popular narrative being pushed throughout the press by supporters of Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy, a narrative I expect will only become more prominent as the presidential race proceeds. Anyway...

The two-party system in the U.S. is, like much of American "democracy" itself, a farce but while that joke is often a cruel one for those who naively believe in it, history makes crystal clear that one of the things that's even worse than a two-party system is a one-party state. Within the battered, degraded framework of liberal democracy, parties with power don't just need a strong opposition party, they need a credible one to act as a persistent challenge and a genuine threat to their continuing rule. Without this, they become stagnant, intellectually lazy, remote from people and their concerns--exceedingly bad qualities for rulers--and liberal democracy itself starts to topple over into something much worse. And since entirely throwing off rulers--my own preferred course of action--doesn't, at the moment, appear to be in the cards, one should consider what would produce the best possible outcome from the unfortunate alternatives immediately before us.

The general election in November is going to be a Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton contest. Democrats engage in an extraordinary amount of fear-mongering regarding Trump and, indeed, there's much to fear in the short term. Trump is an incompetent clown, an unbalanced, even dangerous authoritarian who doesn't know anything about anything and has all the wrong impulses. Whereas Clinton is a conventional corrupt politician whose administration would be marked by divisiveness, bad decision-making, cynical political triangulation, stagnation, a Nixonian level of secrecy and an enthusiasm for foreign adventurism, Trump promises an administration full of torture, the crushing of civil liberties, international belligerence and perpetual hubris by the leader. No one could responsibly vote for him and no one of good conscience will. But in spite of all this, the best possible outcome of a Clinton/Trump contest, from a long-term political perspective, would still arguably be a Trump victory.

Nationally, the Republican party has become the Fox News/Limbaugh/Beck/Breitbart party. In blunt talk, a cancer on the nation. Trump's success is the latest culmination of trends that have been brewing for decades; in the most powerful liberal democracy in the world, a protofascist strongman character has now been chosen as the standard-bearer for one of the major parties. Trump isn't, to be clear, the problem. He's just a symptom. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, the other two major candidates in this year's crowded Republican field, were playing to the same crowd, trying to out-reactionary the front-runner. The conservatives in the race--Jeb Bush, John Kasich, etc.--couldn't get the time of day, though they were the ones who actually represented the larger Republican voting bloc. This Republican party is no longer a credible opposition party. It's a party that, in its present form, needs to die and be replaced, either by a new party or by a risen-from-the-ashes-radically-reformed Republican party, a party that doesn't resemble the one Trump currently leads.

Fortunately, its demise is already underway. The GOP is currently looking at a demographic tsunami that, in the coming decades, threatens to wash it away for good. The days of a major national political party gearing its appeal only to to old white male reactionaries are likely very nearly over. Without major reform, including a radical shift to the left, the party is facing reduction to a regional player, a pair (or more) of irrelevant third-parties at the national level. And on its current course, that's exactly the fate it has earned.

But in politics, as in life (don't you love how I hit those cliche's?), it's sometimes a bit more complicated than population trends.[1]

It isn't exactly news that there's very little popular support for the far-right policies presently embraced by the Republican party. The amount of polling to which Americans are subjected is extraordinary and shuffling through it, one is hard-pressed to find a single issue of major import on which an overwhelming majority  doesn't hold a liberal view. It's a liberal nation. The Republican party tries to hold on to what power it has by gaming the system--gerrymandering congressional districts, attacking campaign finance reform efforts, voter suppression schemes, etc.--but it has amassed a ridiculously disproportionate share of power in the first place merely by virtue of being the only game in town when it comes to expressing dissatisfaction with an incumbent. If people hate an incumbent enough but are, on election day, given only one alternative, they're willing to grant that alternative an extraordinary amount of leeway, sometimes supporting candidates they wouldn't, under normal circumstances, even consider. For the moment, the GOP's nut-right-ness and the public distaste for same isn't, in itself, enough to reliably lead to significant reform of that party.

A presidency led by Clinton--for a quarter-century, one of the right's major hate-figures--certainly wouldn't spur any reform. It would just serve as yet another rallying-point for the reactionaries, a boon to the Breitbarts, Fox Newses, Rush Limbaughs. Because Clinton is, at heart, a rightist, her rule would also divide Democrats in the face of that rally. "Party loyalty" bullshit would come into play and we'd have some Democrats actually defending an array of indefensible rightest policies carried out or attempted by Clinton while Repubs rage against them, siding with the public.

Theoretically, this could become a hook on which Repubs could hang that shift to the left they so desperately need and if that happened, it would be a positive development. History, unfortunately, hasn't been very kind to the prospects for that. To cite but one example, those of my age grew up with the GOP as the hardcore warmonger party, one that scorns diplomacy as the work of pathetic wimps and appeasers and who wishes to turn to military force as the first, last and nearly only solution to any international problem. And that's still pretty much what it is but when the Bill Clinton administration bombed the Balkans, those same Repubs elites suddenly became born-again peaceniks. Then when Bush Jr. became president, they reverted right back to warmongering savages. That leads into another prominent example: during the Bush Jr. administration, Republican  elites seemed ready to simply flush the Bill of Rights in the name of the War On Terror[tm], denouncing as vile traitors anyone who expressed any misgivings about the repressive authoritarian state being constructed by the regime. Then when Obama, the Democrat, became president and continued many of those same policies, they dramatically reversed course and started denouncing them--exactly the same policies--as fundamental threats to the liberties of the republic (some of the footage of these sorts of reversals by Fox News hosts is particularly hilarious). In these and more other cases than can be easily counted, these Repubs elites were never really opposed to the questionable policies; they were just opposed to those carrying them out. Rather than simply conceding they were delighted that the policies they favored were being continued by the other party, they made a cynical show of opposing said policies just to try to monkeywrench that other party. The odds of the current leading voices in the party using the rightist policies of a Hillary Clinton administration as a hook around which to make a genuine, rather than merely feigned, pivot to the left have to be ranked alongside the odds of a Beatles reunion. But they would play at it and doing so would benefit them and help keep the current party alive without any actual reform, while the policies of a Hillary Clinton administration would, by association, only further tarnish the Democratic brand.[2]

No one worthy of being taken seriously could deny a Trump presidency would be much worse than a Clinton one. The checks and balances worked into the federal government would box in many of Trump's worst excesses, a point that is, shall we say, underemphasized by many of those who fear-monger over the prospect of such a presidency. Still, a president is extremely powerful--in the U.S., the single most powerful man in the world--and it would be a mistake to too severely minimize one's estimate of the amount of mischief he could cause. No matter who ultimately wins though, the next president's reign will be short-lived--almost guaranteed to be one-term-and-gone. Both candidates are already hated by most Americans. Clinton's favorability ratings have been in decline for years. People know Clinton. They don't like her. That isn't going to change. Trump hasn't been in politics for long but his favorability ratings have, with the exception of his initial boost when he rose to Repub front-runner, stayed both flat and in the cellar--hated by a large majority since the second he threw his hat into the ring. Neither he nor Clinton have a popular presidency in them. Or a good one. Among other things, the next chief executive will preside over an economic recession. Nothing can be done to stop it--that's just the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism--and despite this, the public will, as usual, blame the party in office for it. It would be better to let the current Republicans take the fall. Clinton is of the 8-year incumbent party then stretched, if she's elected, to a 12-year one, with all the negative consequences I've been describing. She would, of course, run for reelection and Demo voters would back her, locking out the left again and virtually guaranteeing a win by the Repub party--the unreconstructed Repub party, probably led by something even worse than Trump (as difficult a task as it can be to get a third term for an incumbent party, a 4th one simply wouldn't happen except under some extraordinary circumstance).

The fate of congress will also be decided by who wins this presidency. Republicans hold the House of Representatives today solely because of massive gerrymandering in several blue states. The party in the White House always suffers losses in both the U.S. congressional midterm cycles and in elections at the local level. The Democratic party has been utterly devastated at the local level during Obama's tenure, a trend that would continue under Clinton.[3] It's better if it's the GOP running the executive branch and losing that ground, particularly in 2020, because that's when the census will be held and the officials elected that year will be the ones responsible for the subsequent redistricting in the states. If they're Democrats, they can undo the Repub gerrymandering. If Clinton win the White House this year, it will almost certainly be Repubs doing the redistricting, locking themselves into a gamed majority in the House right on through at least 2032 (while, by 2020, Demos will be having trouble electing dog-catchers).[4] That gamed majority is a major impediment to reform in the GOP. Republicans are ensconced in safe districts and don't have to fear challenge by the other party. Instead, they fear being primaried by some reactionary in their own party who thinks they aren't reactionary enough. All the pressure is being applied against reform and toward going as hard-right as possible at all times.

Until fairly recently, Repubs, as the conservative party, have enjoyed another structural advantage: they serve America's entrenched Big Money interests. This kept them well-financed for decades but more recently, Democrats, faced with, among other things, the decline in unions (and consequent decline in union dollars for Democratic campaigns), have started playing in that same rancid sewer, many of the party's elected officials moving well to the right of voters in order to suck up to those same interests. Hillary Clinton was one of the "New Democrat" vanguard when it came to this. It has proven fairly successful too, if one measures "success" only by how much Big Money can be hoovered up. The most extraordinary development of the current presidential cycle is that the Bernie Sanders campaign has dramatically put a stake through the basic lie at the heart of that entire way of doing business. Running a campaign fueled almost entirely by small donations from ordinary people, Sanders was not only able to remain competitive against a candidate who had the support of the entire party Establishment, the Democratic donor base and, I'd, add, most of the corporate press, he actually outraised Clinton through much of the race. The lesson: Democrats don't have to walk all over liberal principles and wallow in that sewer in order to electorally survive. Support is there if they want it and are willing to represent people instead of Big Money. Let the Repubs suck up all that corrupt money and ask people which they prefer.

Trump gears his appeal almost entirely to a hard-right faction that is a minority even within the Repub voting bloc. His protofascism genuinely divides conservatives, which is another of those extraordinary phenomena of this campaign. When it comes to seeming inevitabilities, death and taxes have been joined, for years, by Repub leaders lockstepping on nearly everything of any real significance. Trump breaks that and divides them. A Trump presidency would be like rocket-fuel in accelerating that party's immolation.

Democrats, on the other hand, would, upon losing, finally have to face the fact that Clintonism, "New Democrat"-ism and all the rest of these move-Democrats-to-the-right-isms are finally and for all time dead.

Well, one would hope. Democrats have proven remarkably resistant to learning the proper lessons from their defeats. Their party Establishment, which guides them in such things, is a corrupt gang of self-interested incompetents and grafters--politically, a bunch of lazy, fear-mongering pussies who, when they do anything besides trying to hold on to their own cushy positions, stick to halfheartedly defending past accomplishments instead of advancing any agenda for a future. They need to be gone. Yesterday. A Clinton loss isn't necessarily a magic bullet that will break them but it would be a step in the right direction. They certainly aren't going anywhere soon if Clinton wins. In that scenario, that disgusting Establishment clique, those who did everything they could to foist that weak horror-show of a candidate on America, will see all their dirty dealings to that end vindicated, their rule of the party confirmed at a time when it least deserves to be and the lessons of the Sanders campaign will be cast aside as quickly as possible if they have anything to say about it.

It doesn't have to be that way. The constituency Sanders tapped and the movement that coalesced around his candidacy is still out there. It could move into the vacuum created by a Clinton loss and take over the Democratic party. Democrats could take matters into their own hands and simply remove from the equation the party Establishment, which would already be badly damaged and discredited. Instead of abandoning the public and moving ever rightward in order to sell themselves to Big Money, Democratic candidates can cultivate a constituency of regular folks and serve it. If Clinton should go down in flames in November, all the pieces are there.

So taking the long view, one could certainly argue the best possible outcome of a Clinton/Trump general is a Trump win. A Trump presidency wouldn't be a lot of fun to endure but it would become the rock upon which the Republican party in its present form is finally broken and provide the impetus for both its rebirth and a major reform of the Democratic party.

Heaven help us. Now, I need a shower.

--j.

---

[1] And sometimes--big caveat--it isn't.

[2] When I point that out, it's strictly by way of noting the likely public reaction to the party. My opinion of both the party apparatus and its elected officials could theoretically be lower but that would take some work.

[3] A strong presidential candidate can have electoral coattails that aid downballot Democratic candidates. Unfortunately, Clinton as the presidential standard-bearer this year will likely mean Demos lose even more ground in elections around the U.S. in November.

[4] It's also quite possible that Republicans could capture enough state legislatures to begin adding all sorts of horrors to the constitution itself. Democratic losses in recent years have meant they're already well on their way to the 38 needed for this.

The Associated Press Tries To Decide the Democratic Contest [Updated Below]

June Surprise Dept. - As the presidential primary season winds down, the corporate press just couldn't resist giving Hillary Clinton one more gift. Last night, the Associated Press, in an exercise in journalistic malpractice that stands out as extraordinary even for this campaign, chose the eve of the last six big Democratic primary contests--collectively, the 2nd-biggest day on the Democratic primary calendar--to declare Clinton the "presumptive nominee" of the Democratic party. The AP reached this conclusion by canvassing the party superdelegates and finding a sufficient number of them willing to anonymously express an initial preference for Clinton to put her over the threshold for victory. The tv news channels dutifully plastered the story all over the airwaves last night.

This comes just as Clinton was facing the prospect of ending the primary season with an embarrassing loss to challenger Bernie Sanders in massive California. The initial single-paragraph AP story was released at 5:20 p.m. Pacific time--just in time to make the evening news in California and the prime-time news shows in the East--with the full story appearing at 8:24 p.m. Pacific and its effect can only be to suppress the pro-Sanders turnout in California and in the five other states voting today. The AP's language is celebratory pomposity:

"Striding into history, Hillary Clinton will become the first woman to top the presidential ticket of a major U.S. political party, capturing commitments Monday from the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination.

"Clinton's rise to presumptive nominee arrived nearly eight years to the day after she conceded her first White House campaign to Barack Obama. Back then, she famously noted her inability to 'shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling.'

"Campaigning this time as the loyal successor to the nation's first black president, Clinton held off a surprisingly strong challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. He mobilized millions with a fervently liberal message and his insurgent candidacy revealed a deep level of national frustration with politics-as-usual, even among Democrats who have controlled the White House since 2009.

"The former secretary of state, New York senator and first lady reached the 2,383 delegates needed to become the presumptive Democratic nominee on Monday with a decisive weekend victory in Puerto Rico and a burst of last-minute support from superdelegates."

All hail the conquering queen, eh? The wording of that last paragraph is misleading; Clinton actually won Puerto Rico on Saturday, not Monday, and it didn't put her over the top.

And neither did anything else. Clinching the Democratic nomination requires 2,383 delegates; as of now, Clinton only has 1,812 to Sanders' 1,521. The party insiders designated as superdelegates--the ones the AP now asserts have put Clinton over the top--haven't, in fact, voted yet and won't until the Democratic convention at the end of July. They're free to change their mind at any point between now and then. News Reviews has covered the corporate press's ubiquitous practice of including the superdelegates in nearly every accounting of the Democratic race. As this writer noted in March,

"Regardless of their initial preferences, the supers have always come to back the candidate who wins the primary process and, indeed, practically speaking, they simply have no other choice; if voters chose one candidate and the supers chose, instead, to make the loser the nominee, the party would implode."

The supers represent the party Establishment. Including them in the delegate count is not only a case of pro-Establishment bias, it seriously distorts the state of the race and, by extension, the race itself. Clinton was represented as already having a lead of hundreds of delegates before a single vote had even been cast. Throughout the process, the press applied the supers to the delegate count to make her lead, which has actually been rather small, appear insurmountable. Bombarding the public with this on a daily basis has made it look as if Sanders has no chance of winning, with all the accompanying effects of this perception on the ongoing election. It's the corporate press acting as an arm of the Clinton campaign, pimping that campaign's carefully cultivated narrative of her inevitability. The AP story from last night is the culmination of this sorry trend, one last intervention to help the conquering queen stride into history.

This superdelegate nonsense is, of course, only one of the infinity of ways in which the press has kept its collective thumb on the scales on Clinton's behalf. The coverage has, by and large, been a scandal, so one-sidedly pro-Clinton and anti-Sanders as to be comical. At first, Sanders' candidacy was almost entirely ignored. What coverage he did receive ranged from dismissive to openly hostile. The New York Daily News reflected the general tone when it called Sanders "a fantasist who's at passionate war with reality." When interviewed by the New York Times Magazine, he was asked, "Do you think it's fair that Hillary's hair gets a lot more scrutiny than yours does?" ABC News was running "news reports" on the Democratic race every night that were practically indistinguishable from Clinton campaign ads. In 16 hours leading up to the ever-important Michigan primary, the Washington Post ran 16 anti-Sanders stories. When they realized a positive story about Sanders' legislative record somehow made it onto the New York Times website, Times editors took it down, rewrote it in order to turn it into an anti-Sanders hit-piece then republished it, without ever indicating they'd made any changes at all. The Post ran a hard-hitting piece of investigative journalism wherein Philip Bump asserted that Sanders was lying when he was forever saying the average donation to his campaign is $27. Bump crunched the numbers and discovered that the actual average contribution is--wait for it--$29.14. Only yesterday, as Sanders took questions in California, a New York Times reporter actually asked if Sanders was "sexist" for running against Clinton, thus perhaps getting in the way of her becoming the first woman elected president.[1] While entirely consistent with the narrative offered by Clinton and her surrogates--that virtually any criticism of the candidate amounts to "sexism"--that ain't journalism. That particular (and particularly scurrilous) charge has only gotten worse as the campaign has continued (if there was another month to the primary season, Clinton's surrogates would be accusing Sanders of being a sexist for merely existing).[2] And on and on and on.

If you're one who subscribes to the Cult of Objectivity in journalism and thinks the news media are supposed to present the news in any sort of unbiased manner, you're appalled by what the AP did last night. Likewise, if you're one who thinks it isn't the job of the press to decide our political contests, you find the AP's actions both deplorable and indefensible. This writer must admit to being of a somewhat divided mind on all of this. I'm a radical. I don't believe in liberal democracy, not the U.S. version or any other permutation. My view is that the entire ball of wax is, fundamentally, a preposterous fraud and watching things like this, I'll confess part of me just wants to sit back and laugh at everyone who takes it seriously and thinks they have any real say in the matter. I have little use for the Cult of Objectivity; I'm a strong advocate of a press that stands up for the public and afflicts the powerful, exactly the opposite of the corporate press that exists now. My view on this is arguably anachronistic, an at-best-quaint 18th century idealization of what a news media should be. Our modern press is just another Big Money interest. It doesn't just stand up for the powerful, it's among them. For this element, no left candidate will ever be acceptable and every measure to defeat and destroy any who appear will be. The actions of the AP are deplorable. The rest of the press in repeating them are deplorable. Part of me just laughs but another, that bigger part that reacts with disgust at powerful interests who manipulate people to their own benefit, often to the harm of the people themselves, is compelled to rage against it. All of it. Maybe I'm just a chump.

--j.

---

[1] Though it parroted the AP story, the Times did raise an eyebrow about it, noting that "the timing of the A.P. alert... was unusual, coming on the eve of six primaries, including the big states of New Jersey and California on Tuesday."

[2] Throughout the campaign, Clinton surrogates constantly deployed a noxious smear against Sanders supporters, portraying them as frat-boy misogynists--"Bernie Bros." This was debunked almost immediately but has continued to ubiquitously circulate in discussions of the campaign, despite being just a repackaged smear from 2008 (when Obama's supporters opposed to Clinton were accused of being the frat-boy misogynists and labeled "Obama Boys").


Postscript: This year, Bernie Sanders attempted something remarkable, a successful presidential campaign that represented and was financed by the public, rather than a handful of powerful interests. I've been impressed with how far he's been able to get--it's extraordinary, really. Consider this: Sanders' views reflect those of not only the overwhelming majority of the Democratic party but the overwhelming majority of the public and even, on many issues, of Republicans. He has the highest favorability of anyone in the race. He does far better than his opponent against Republican candidate Donald Trump. Yet it's Hillary Clinton, presently despised by 56% of the public, who is on her way to becoming the Democratic nominee. Stepping back further, Clinton and Trump are two of the most despised presidential candidates on record, both hated by huge majorities of Americans, yet if they sew up their respective nominations and no independent candidate appears, one of them is going to be elected President of the United States in November. Can there be any worse an indictment of American liberal democracy than the fact that, with a far better outcome available, these are the results it yields?


UPDATE (Wed., 8 June) - The final California polls were all showing a statistical tie, with the trend being Sanders rising and Clinton falling. This attempt by the press to call the contest before it happened had the expected result. turnout in CA crashed and Clinton won the state by over 12%, a margin over twice what even Nate Silver's pro-Clinton weighting system predicted (Silver had Clinton winning by only 5.1%).

To put that 12+% margin in context, the Real Clear Politics polling average goes back to mid-March and at no point from then until yesterday did Clinton had that dramatic a lead. The best she'd ever managed was a hair over 10% way back in April. The final polls in RCP's database all had the race at 2%--within the margin of error. Huffpost Pollster had it even tighter over the last few months--from mid-March until yesterday, it had been a single-digit race (Huffpost uses some of the same polls as RCP, so there's some overlap).

Google reports that 3,442,623 voters participated in the California primary. This compares with 4,794,846 who participated in the last contested Democratic primary in 2008. This primary season, it should be said, has regularly featured much lower turnout than the often-record-setting 2008. How much the early call contributed to this we'll probably never know--it isn't something the corporate press are going to be particularly interested in investigating--but the polling evidence certainly suggests the effect was dramatic.

Harry Enten Continues 538's Descent Into Political Hackery

Lying With Numbers Dept. - In the beginning, Nate Silver's 538 could have been seen as a noble experiment--a just-the-facts-ma'am approach to political contests. However one may have characterized it at its birth though, that experiment has spectacularly crashed and burned this election cycle. The 538 gang, once so committed to the numbers, have increasingly turned, for new sources, to their own orifices. Last Summer, Harry Enten boldly declared that "[Donald] Trump has a better chance of... playing in the NBA Finals... than winning the Republican nomination." Two months later, Silver himself said this about the Republican contest:

"At FiveThirtyEight, however, we’re fairly agnostic about what will happen to Trump's polling in the near term. It’s possible that he's already peaked--or that he'll hold his support all the way through Iowa and New Hampshire, possibly even winning one or two early states, as similar candidates like Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich have in the past. Our emphatic prediction is simply that Trump will not win the nomination."

Uh huh. On the Democratic side, 538's forecasting process has shown a rather extreme pro-Clinton bias (covered by Doug Johnson Hatlem on Counterpunch last month):

"...outside the South, 538 has a 12.2% Clinton House effect on the Democratic side. In eighteen of the twenty-one races, 538’s projection or modelling has shown a Clinton bias."

...which brings me to the Enten's particularly deplorable article the other day, "The System Isn't 'Rigged' Against Sanders":

"Sanders fans have claimed that because caucuses have lower turnout, the current national caucus and primary vote underrates how well Sanders is doing. In fact, the opposite is true. When we switch all caucuses over to primaries, Sanders actually does worse."

But of course there's no way, absent the use of magic, to "switch all caucuses over to primaries" or to work any of the other witchcraft Enten claims he's accomplished in this piece. The math Enten uses to pretend to do all this reality-altering is, like the premise of the article itself, purely Uranian. Enten pretends he can wave a wand and conjure up a reliable primary result from places where no primary contest ever took place and show, with real numbers, what would happen in closed primary states if they'd held open ones. He can't. And he knows it.

He begins his case with Hillary Clinton's "win" in the Washington state primary. This was held after Washington's delegates had already been allocated via a caucus, which Sanders had won. The subsequent "primary," which went for Clinton, was, as even Enten describes it, purely a beauty-contest. No candidate campaigned for that "primary." How much attention and enthusiasm is going to go toward a "primary" in which there's nothing at stake and no one even competing for votes? Enten sort of acknowledges the obvious answer but why even bring it up? It's a bit of sleight of hand for what comes next.

This can't be said forcefully enough: the "estimates" Enten uses here--magically turning caucuses into primaries and even caucuses and primaries into open primaries--are pure fantasy. No polling data exists to support Enten's conclusions. They're based on what he says is a "demographic model" but that model runs into a pretty serious brick wall in the form of the actual results of these contests. The Iowa caucus, for example, ended in a virtual tie. Given to Clinton, it may have even been won by Sanders--the Democratic party has refused to release the raw totals that would quantify the result. The polling leading up to the caucus tells the same tale as polling in most of the rest of the U.S.; Sanders started out as an unknown with massive 30- and 40-point gaps with Clinton, sometimes even more, and as the race proceeded, Clinton's lead progressively vanished. By the end, it was a low-single-digit race, with every new poll seeming to declare a change in the frontrunner. Polls in caucus states are, of course, typically of likely caucus participants, a much smaller group than would participate in a primary, but Enten asserts that if Iowa had held a primary instead of a caucus, Clinton would have won by a massive 24 points--a one-sided massacre of epic proportions. If Clinton supporters so decisively outnumbered Sanders supporters in the state-- by Enten's measure, nearly 3 1/2 Hillary supporters for every 2 Bernie supporters--how did we get the caucus results we did? To find Enten's conclusion at all plausible, one must believe there was some sort of catastrophic--and entirely unexplained--breakdown in getting Clinton people to the caucus. As the press delights in asserting, Sanders' strongest demographic is white Democrats (though in reality, it's actually young people of all races and ethnicities) and Enten has Clinton utterly rolling over Sanders in one of the whitest states in the U.S.. Many of Enten's results are like that. Clinton won the Nevada caucus by 5 points; Enten has her winning a theoretical primary there by 29%. Sanders dominated Clinton in Colorado, a 19% spread in the caucus; Enten's imaginary Colorado primary goes to Clinton by 6%. And so on. This is a "demographic model" that, on its face, seems to have sprung a rather serious leak. Enten pretends to provide numbers on what would happen if states with closed primaries had held open ones, which is just as baseless a fantasy.

Enten also appears to have committed some other pretty basic fallacies in assembling his presentation. When Sanders supporters suggest the nomination process is "rigged" in Clinton's favor, they aren't just referring to chicanery in the mechanics of the primary/caucus system in the many states. They're also talking about things like the nonsense with the debate schedule, which was not only changed but radically so and specifically to help Clinton, the fact that the head of the DNC, who is supposed to be neutral in the contest, is a former Clinton hand who, from the beginning, has been doing everything she can to try to help her candidate, the funneling of funds raised for downballot races into Clinton's coffers, the fact that the corporate press has been a virtual monolith in support of Clinton and opposition to Sanders and so on. Enten simply ignores all of this, focusing strictly on the question of caucuses vs. primaries vs. open primaries but pretends to be "refuting" those suggestions that the system is rigged. With regard to his "demographic model," he asserts he can create such a thing because voting this cycle has largely broken down along demographic lines, but that, of course, assumes his own conclusion within the question. Voting has broken down along those demographic lines in the election as it's being held but this is the very process Sanders' supporters have asserted is rigged--the proposition Enten is trying to refute. Ignoring their larger criticism of the process becomes even more problematic. For someone relying so heavily on demographics, Enten didn't use much demographic data in creating his model either:

"...they [the 538 gang] reduced all demographic differences between states with primaries and states with caucuses to two variables: proportion of black voters and proportion of Hispanic voters. Age? Income? Education? Geographic region? Religious differences? Economic indicators, like unemployment? Apparently none of these things matter, according to Silver and Enten... This is obviously incorrect, we know very well that at minimum age is an incredibly important variable. Young voters of all races prefer Sanders, and older voters of all races prefer Clinton... By leaving out many factors which are important for determining differences between states that could affect the vote outcomes, their analysis is subject to omitted variable bias."

Further, it's impossible via Enten's exercise to reproduce the dynamics of an ongoing campaign, where wins and losses in contests and how both are perceived by the public and presented by the press affect the next contests, the results of which affect the next and on into infinity.

Though in many cases, the system has been rigged against Sanders personally, focusing merely on that overlooks the scope of the issue. It's better to say it's rigged against anyone like Sanders, an outsider challenging the party's entrenched. Discussing the Democratic "superdelegate" system in February, DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz confessed:

“Unpledged delegates [superdelegates] exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don’t have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."

The superdelegate system is only one aspect of that rigged process. Even as the head of the Democratic National Committee, who also happens to be an all-out Clinton supporter, can admit this is designed to protect Establishment candidates, Harry Enten continues 538's descent into hackery by playing these elaborate and absurd games that have no other purpose than to act as propaganda for one candidate in a contested race.

--j.

"Vote For Clinton Because She's A Woman"-ism Spawns Another Awful Article

Gender Politics? Dept. - In a campaign season where poorly reasoned, uninformed and just plain dumb articles on behalf of Hillary Clinton's candidacy have become a regular occurrence, Marcie Bianco, a contributing editor at Curve, has authored a standout example of the subgenre. It fails in its first paragraph and never gets any better:

"A patriarchal ploy to keep women divided, women have been harangued for 'voting with their vagina' for months. Such crude critiques are designed to undermine female political agency—specifically their support for other women."

But, of course, that isn't the "critique" or part of some patriarchal conspiracy; it's a direct reflection of what one Clinton supporter after another has, with the encouragement of the candidate herself, been saying. "We're supporting Clinton because she's a woman." Contrary to Bianco's crude framing, that view has been offered by Clinton supporters both girl and boy throughout the campaign and the actual critique of it, thrown at both by critics girl and boy alike, is that it's stupid. Does it really need to be noted, in 2016, that a candidate's gender constitutes absolutely no reason to support (or oppose) that candidate? Even those who are currently insisting Hillary's girl-parts are a reason to vote for her don't, themselves, believe that, because if the candidate in question was some reactionary grotesquerie like, say, Sarah Palin, the number of them who would be spouting that nonsense and backing said candidate is exactly zero.

Former lefty pol Tom Hayden sure as hell wouldn't be backing Palin. In his writing over the years, he's offered nothing but scorn and contempt for her. In 2008, he said the foreign policy she advocated constituted nothing less than "a mortal threat to America." Yet when he wrote an article that appeared shortly before Bianco's in which he came out as a Clinton supporter, he was singing that tune: "...I have been so tied to the women’s movement that I cannot imagine scoffing at the chance to vote for a woman president." Bianco read that article--she approvingly quotes a different portion of it.

This "vote for Clinton because she's a woman" stuff is intellectually empty, emotional applause-line idiocy, encouraged at every turn by the candidate herself. Hayden, Bianco and everyone else shoveling it have, in reality, various issues that are important to them, just like everyone else; where a candidate stands on those issues will make up a part of whether they back that candidate, just as with everyone else, and contrary to these campaign-season assertions, a candidate's gender will play no real role in their decision.

Which brings me to this from Bianco:

"Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock explained her support for Clinton by highlighting the former secretary of state’s prioritization of reproductive rights and reproductive justice. Rival Bernie Sanders, Schriock notes, 'treats abortion rights like an afterthought.'"

But Bernie Sanders has a 100% rating from both the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He's literally never cast a single vote with which these orgs disagree. How much more forthrightly pro-choice can a candidate be?

Hold that thought.

"While admirable, Sanders’s 'revolution' is primarily an economic one. And despite what he may say, an economic revolution is not tantamount to a sociopolitical overhaul. To put a finer point on it: Achieving a $15 minimum wage will not stop racially prejudiced cops from shooting black people. It will not stop immigrants or refugees from being detained at our borders. Dismantling Wall Street, whatever that means exactly, will not shore up or extend women’s reproductive rights."

It's fortunate, then, that, contrary to this nonsense, Sanders doesn't try to solve those problems via a minimum wage hike and has an actual program that addresses each of them:
http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-criminal-justice/http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-criminal-justice/
http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-racial-justice/http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-racial-justice/
http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-immigration/
http://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-womens-rights/
As Bianco would well know if she'd done even the most minimal research, Sanders has been addressing such issues for decades. Sanders, in fact, has one of the most ambitious proposed agendas of any presidential candidate in five decades or more:
http://feelthebern.org/all-issues/

Bianco:

"It’s a fallacy on Sanders’s part to believe that a 'revolution' in America could be so divorced from identity politics. As the New York Daily News wrote in their endorsement of Clinton, Sanders is 'a fantasist who’s at passionate war with reality.' Clinton’s policy ideas, meanwhile, 'are shaped for the world in which we live, not the world in which we might wish to live.'... Clinton’s platform is designed to advance the rights of the systemically oppressed. This is why she has the support of women’s rights groups, from Planned Parenthood to Emily’s List to the Human Rights Campaign, in addition to countless endorsements from leaders within the black and Latino communities."

As already noted, Sanders has a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood. He also has a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign. He holds a 100% rating from the NAACP and the ACLU and the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda and on and on. If one is looking for reasons why groups like PP and Emily's List endorse Clinton and work against Sanders, one must look too their close--and, some would argue, corrupt--integration with the Democratic Establishment; one won't find it in any of Sanders' actual views on the issues important to them.

Bianco is aware of this. For all her talk about "Clinton's platform" and the centrality to her argument of its alleged superiority to that of Sanders, she makes no case for it being any better and, indeed, no effort to differentiate it at all. Clinton sheds personae like a snake does skin and her current one is that of a watered-down version of Sanders. Bianco asserts that Clinton "gets things done," but doesn't offer even a single example. Indeed, she links--perhaps accidentally?--to a Jeff Cohen article that illustrates some of Clinton's infinity of outright anti-progressive views. If that's the sort of thing Bianco wants to get done, I suppose Clinton is the perfect candidate for her.[1] It's a matter of public record that, while in the Senate, Clinton sponsored a grand total of three bills that became law, one renaming a highway, one renaming a post-office and one designating a building in Troy, New York as an historic site. That's Hillary Clinton, the gal who "gets things done."[2]

Bianco concludes her train-wreck of an article with this:

"As a feminist, my identity is defined by the fight for equal rights for women, gender parity, equal representation in politics, and women’s reproductive justice. So, yes, my vote will most definitely be dictated by my vagina. And that vote is for Hillary Clinton."

But even if Bianco thinks her desire to vote for Clinton sprang from her vagina, the orifice from which her Orwellian farce of article emerged is clearly a little further back.

--j.

---

[1] Relevant to Bianco's crowing about endorsements, Cohen also goes into how Sanders has long represented the views of various interst groups only to see those groups endorse Clinton, who works against their positions.

[2] Sanders, the "fantasist who’s at passionate war with reality," has a much more extensive and impressive record of liberal legislative accomplishments:
https://pplswar.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/what-bernie-sanders-got-done-in-washington-a-legislative-inventory/
And:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-gets-it-done-sanders-record-pushing-through-major-reforms-will-surprise-you